They said I was crazy...

They'd all laugh if they knew what I was doing...

To create the world's most powerful macro flash with a fraction of Canon's resources and obsolete Vivitar flashes for parts...

"Bokchoi, he's mad," they'd say. "He's insane, he's dangerous!"

Well I'll show them! I'LL SHOW THEM ALL!

I was thinking of doing the same thing, but even I thought I was nuts.
Is one of those a beauty light?

Bad ass... tutorial on how you made?

The ringlight in the middle is actually a Vivitar 5000 Macrolight, plugged into the PC port on the camera, while one of the Vivitar 283 flashes is physically connected to the hotshoe, and supported by an Ebay Stroboframe knockoff. The final Vivitar 283 flash is supported by a very cheap Ebay bracket and an Ultramount head, and is triggered by an optical slave, so I wouldn't expect it to work well outside on a sunny day.

The setup does work, but I did it a bit more as an experiment, and it is horribly cumbersome to use; the flashes are heavy, the supports are flimsy and tend to move all over the place, all the flashes save for the ringlight need to be manually adjusted, while the ringlight tends to overexpose because it lacks any sort of manual control. I wasn't able to test the rig on any real "macro-like" subjects because of the 40cm of snow outside, but I'm not confident the setup would survive much bouncing around in my backyard, nevermind a hike through the woods.

As fun as it was to put everything together (and cackle diabolically while doing so), I'll stick to my 430EX plus Vivtar 5000, which, while heavy, is still portable and does the job consistently enough for my needs.

Also, to anyone who is inclined to repeat my mad scientist experiments: Don't use flashes of unknown trigger voltage! In addition to the manual controls, I modified these two Vivitar 283s to 4.5V trigger voltage from over 100V, and checked the Macroflash again and again to make sure the voltage was low enough and safe to use on my 40D. If you don't do this, you run the risk of destroying your camera's electronics!

Always thought it interesting how the more extreme macro setups start looking like weird bugs
How did you mod the trigger voltage - do I see an added potentiometer there ?
Brian v.

I modded the trigger voltage using the schematic from Sam's Strobe FAQ, found at http://www.repairfaq.o​rg/sam/strbfaq.htm#str​boaof (look under "Zener Protected Adapter for Older Flash Units to Low Voltage Camera"). The package was small and neat enough to fit inside of the flash without any problems at all, before I added the box on the outside for the power adjustment.

The power adjustment you see is not a potentiometer, but actually a rotary switch that has discrete positions for flash power, from 1/128 to 1/1 in 1-stop increments; I did it this way because the non-linear resistance levels needed to control the flash power make it difficult to consistently set the flash power using a smooth potentiometer in certain cases.

The flashes are surprisingly usable as a manual on-camera strobe or bounce, but it's the loud whine of the oscillators that makes me love using them.